perfidy

Two things.

1) You changed the "Read more" link, not the "Read less" link, it should be the compacting one that reads "Way too much goddamned perfidy". (Yay for nitpicking!)

2) I'll disagree - yes, grunge was awesome(I'm listening to Soundgarden as I type this, for example), but I don't think that today's music is any more ripoffy than music in the past. There's no truly virgin ground in the music industry, everything has been done by somebody before(or it's too messed-up/crappy for anyone to have bothered before, but that's not an improvement), but that's also been true for probably 20 years(ever since people started really playing with electronics making music instead of instruments). You can always draw people pack to their forebears, but they're all adding something new, too.

That said, I can certainly wish for a little more ingenuity - there's plenty of crap in the music world today, and getting rid of a lot of it in favour of legitimately good music would be much appreciated.

1) I would strongly recommend you check out Buckethead's post[url="http://old.perfidy.org/comments.php?id=P2047_0_1_0"]here[/url] for an understanding of why the "more" link has been so changed. Be warned: it's a goooood reason.

2) I have another post coming on derivativeness in music and why it's necessary.

3) Given that you disagree, I'm curious to see examples of stuff that's less ripoffy these days. I mean, I'm with you 100%, but Green Day didn't suck, and Sum 47 kinda do, even though they're pretty much the exact same band, with the exact same chain of influences.

J,
A couple thoughts on this.

From my point of view, rock bottoms out every few years anyway until something interesting and exciting comes along to stir the shit up again. You could maybe gauge that by album, like what happened with "Appetite for Destruction" say, or later with "Nevermind."

So maybe we're just at the bottom of a rock n roll recession, and the greatest record of the last 10 years is coming off the presses right now, or is already out there and we, the unwashed multitudes, just don't know it yet. As opposed to marketing people, who must manufacture enthusiasm for mediocre acts or, lacking even that, make it up entirely (Strokes, YeahYeahYeahs, I'm looking in your direction). Or maybe even the band is completely unknown, still holed up in a garage, figuring out what they can pawn next to raise enough dough for new 6L6s for the lead player's sadly defunct Marshall head.

That's one thought, my perhaps hopeful thought.

My other thought is that I stopped caring about popular music ca 1999. Not that I gave all my records away and threw my Strat into the fireplace. But I stopped caring to make it such a part of my life. Most of the new acts I heard sucked, and had sucked for years, and I decided that instead of being crushingly disappointed, and reamining ever thirsty for something new AND interesting, I pretty much gave up and stopped taking it personally.

Now I buy "classic" rock records and explore old school jazz and blues. I think the last new record I bought was Queens of the Stone Age, more to round out my Kyuss collection than the strength of that release alone, and that was at least 18 months ago.

So I'm not going to attempt to prove you wrong, because I'm not going to engage. I'll say that the best case is that the current rock free fall is temporary. But another question might be, Why should we care about rock at all today?

Actually, I think we're coming out of the trough slightly. My gauge for this is "alternative" radio in DC. When I first moved to DC in '99, all I listened to was radio. My CDs were in a box in the house, and I never needed them except for long trips back to Ohio. Radio was cool, and the new stuff had ten years of goodness in reserve. Then, over the next two years, it went straight to hell. Nothing was good, except for the nineties nooner. CDs were unpacked, and I went on a bluegrass/blues/americana binge. Now, about half the songs on alternative radio are decent enough to warrant listening to. I switch stations less often.

I've heard Johno talk about derivativeness in music, and it's all true. Which is why hearing and even occasionally understanding how an artist is taking something old and tweaking it is cool. Of course, you have to know about the old stuff. My appreciation for seventies rock has gone way up the more blues and old country I listen to.

GL, btw, I just bought the Yeah Yeah Yeahs album yesterday. (Impulse buy, $8.99 disc) And you know, I dig it. It reminds me a bit of Concrete Blonde, a bit of Siouxie and the Banshees. It's fun.

As the Republican in these strange and dangerous times, it's now my job to have unparalleled optimism for the future of music as in everything else. We are entering a new golden age of popular music, I'm sure of it.

Actually, I should probably have brought up the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as one of my new favorites. I love their record!

We may be coming out of the trough slightly, and things might be getting less dismal. But I have yet to see a new superstar emerge, and that's what I'm looking for. Of course, that begs GL's question-- why exactly should we care?

Well... you don't have to care, but I sure do. Rock is the closest thing to church I know, outside of church. And I don't go to church much.

Well, if there are actual people who actually like an act, people whose opinion I respect, then I might dig that act too. But when out of the blue, Manhattan or LA marketeers descend from on high and announce that this, this, and that group are now COOL, you can see how that rubs a fella the wrong way.

Forgot to mention before that I listen to "Live Through This" approximately monthly. More if I'm playing to it.

If rock is a religion... I'm hard pressed to make a nifty analogy. Maybe rock needs to start preaching in the vernacular, instead of stubbornly sticking with the classical language. No, not latin. Verse/chrous/verse, or electric guitars, or wanking solos, or...

Man, I hated early nineties music. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, et al., weren't doing anything that Husker Du, The Replacements, The Pixies, and and REM hadn't already done much better. Plus, you got that horrid (what's the opposite of a falsetto?) Eddie Vedder vocal styling that's still with us and just won't die. The '90s was chock full of horrible music and overblown, ultra-serious craptastic rock.

Call me an indie-music snob (it wouldn't be the first time, trust me), but I'll take some of todays bands (at random, Modest Mouse, The Shins, Wilco, and the Libertines) over anything that was made in the first half of the 1990s.

I've bought a lot of albums by new bands in the last year or two -- the Strokes, Fiery Furnaces, Franz Ferdinand, to name a few -- but I don't listen to any of them nearly as much as I listen to, say Girlfriend or Vs..

On the other hand, albums by bands like the New Pornographers and Rilo Kiley regularly find themselves in my playlists.

I think part of the difference is the flipside that's come with the democratization of the music world through filesharing and online availability; freeing music from the gatekeeping role of radio means that there's a lot more chaff to sort through before you find the wheat.